Are China’s leaders destined to ask each other, “Who lost Hong Kong?” It’s a question worth pondering after a holiday week that offered a stark reminder of just how restless -- if not unhappy -- a sizable percentage of the former colony’s residents are under Chinese rule, 17 years after the end of British sovereignty. Of course, nobody seriously entertains the idea of a political schism between Hong Kong and China.

Judging by 2014's crowded election calendar, this will be a landmark year for democracy. The Economist estimates that an unprecedented 40 percent of the world’s population will have a chance to vote in national polls in 2014. We'll see races in populous countries such as Brazil, Indonesia, the United States, and, most notably, India, where 700 million people are expected to cast ballots in what Fareed Zakaria has called the “largest democratic process in human history.”

Violence marred Sunday's controversial general elections in Bangladesh, causing several deaths in clashes between opposition supporters and police. The outcome of the contest is not in doubt, as the poll was only contested in 147 of the 300 parliamentary seats up for grabs. With the opposition BNP party and its allies boycotting the poll, governing Awami League candidates or allies have a clear run in the remaining 153 seats.

The voice on the radio is calm, its message anything but. “Civil war is going to happen,” says the announcer on a station broadcast across the arid plateau around Khon Kaen, where rice paddies, cane fields and fishing-net factories form the geographic heart of the country’s red-shirt movement. It is now preparing to fight back if the government it supports, under caretaker Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, falls. “All sides, get ready,” the voice says. “We are ready to come together any time in the name of democracy.”

Belying his hard-earned reputation as his country's strongman, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen said years ago that his prowess in overcoming adversaries did not lie in his strength, but in their weakness. Hun Sen, 61, has ruled Cambodia for close to 30 years, but now he faces the first real test of his strength in a decade and a half.

Tens of thousands of antigovernment demonstrators marched through Phnom Penh on Sunday in one of the biggest acts of defiance against the nearly three decades of rule by Cambodia’s authoritarian prime minister, Hun Sen. The procession, which was peaceful and stretched for several miles through a commercial district of Phnom Penh, the capital, brought together protesters with a diverse list of grievances: Buddhist monks, garment workers, farmers and supporters of the main opposition party.

American-style debates, polling and current affairs programming are bringing a whole new level of political punditry to Afghanistan as the country prepares to elect a new president. Campaign managers, TV producers and pollsters are hot commodities in Kabul as live "town halls" and meet-and-greet interviews aimed at driving the democratic debate forward are getting more attention than ever before.

The election of Michelle Bachelet as Chile’s new president earlier this month saw the continuation in the rise of women to positions of political power throughout Latin America, garnering praise from analysts concerned with women’s rights in the land of machismo, at a time when the world's leading superpower has yet to see a female as its top leader.